The Neanderthals are both the most familiar and the least understood of all our fossil kin.

For decades after the initial discovery of their bones in a cave in Germany in 1856 Homo neanderthalensis was viewed as a hairy brute who stumbled around Ice Age Eurasia on bent knees, eventually to be replaced by elegant, upright Cro-Magnon, the true ancestor of modern Europeans.

Science has long since killed off the notion of that witless caveman, but Neanderthals have still been regarded as quintessential losers—a large-brained, well-adapted species of human that went extinct nevertheless, yielding the Eurasian continent to anatomically modern humans, who began to migrate out of Africa some 60,000 years ago.

Lately, the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans has gotten spicier.

According to a new study that analyzed traces of Neanderthal DNA in present-day humans, Neanderthals may have been interbreeding with some of the ancestors of modern Eurasians as recently as 37,000 years ago. And another recent study found that Asian and South American people possess an even greater percentage of Neanderthal genes.

In their original incarnation, Neanderthals were viewed as the primitive, backward cave dwellers of Eurasia, far less complex than the sophisticated Homo sapiens who used language and developed sophisticated art as they migrated out of Africa and conquered the world.

But new studies are making it much harder to draw a clean line between us and them.

"It's increasingly difficult to point to any one thing that Neanderthals did and Homo sapiens didn't do and vice versa," said John Shea, an archaeologist at Stony Brook University in New York.

"These Ice Age people, both Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, survived, thrived, and increased their numbers under conditions that would probably kill people nowadays, even ones that are equipped with modern survival technology."

No Hanky-Panky Necessary?

The draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, published in the journal Science in 2010, provided the first compelling genetic evidence that Neanderthals and H. sapiens had more in common than just an ancestor in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The researchers, under the direction of Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, found that 2.5 percent of the genome of an average human living outside Africa today is made up of Neanderthal DNA. The average modern African has none.

This suggested that some interbreeding had taken place between the two kinds of human, probably in the Middle East, where the early modern humans migrating out of Africa would have encountered Neanderthals already living there.

A new study by Pääbo's team, published last week in PLOS Genetics, also considered the possibility that the presence of Neanderthal DNA in people living outside Africa today could be traced far back, to the common ancestor of both Neanderthals and modern humans in Africa.

Perhaps the early modern humans who left Africa 60,000 years ago were already genetically more similar to the Neanderthals—who had left hundreds of thousands of years before—than were the modern human populations that stayed behind in Africa. In that case, no interbreeding would have needed to occur to account for the trace of Neanderthal DNA in non-Africans today.

To test the two hypotheses, Pääbo's group analyzed the lengths of segments of Neanderthal DNA in modern Europeans to determine when Neanderthal genes may have mixed with those of modern humans. The date they came up with for the gene flow was 37,000 to 86,000 years ago, and most likely 47,000 to 65,000 years ago.

This date strongly suggests there was indeed interbreeding between "us and them," when H. sapiens was moving into the Middle East from Africa and would have encountered populations of Neanderthals already settled there.

"This [interbreeding] could have been a really powerful mechanism for humans to adapt as they moved into Eurasia," said Sriram Sankararaman, a statistical geneticist at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the PLOS Genetics study.

Another group, publishing last year in Science, for example, determined that modern humans gained from Neanderthals a family of genes that helps the immune system fight off viruses. Breeding with the locals could have unwittingly given H. sapiens a survival advantage in a new land.

"[Neanderthals] are not just some extinct group of related hominids," Pääbo said. "They are partially ancestors to people who live today."

Take any two unrelated humans today, Pääbo noted, and they'll differ in millions of places in their genetic code. But the Neanderthal genome varies on average from that of H. sapiens in only about a hundred thousand positions. Pääbo and his colleagues are now trying to figure out the consequences of those differences.

"We have other evidence for Neanderthals preferring mineral pigments that are dark, blackish color," Stony Brook's Shea said. "There may be something for them with the color black just as there seems to be something for us with the color red."

Sophisticated art, however, still appears to remain in the realm of H. sapiens.

The ancestors of modern humans left behind images of animals and other objects in caves around the world, most famously at Lascaux cave and Chauvet Cave (pictures) in southern France. Paintings in the latter cave could be as ancient as 37,000 years old. (See a prehistoric time line.)

Images found in a cave called El Castillo on the Spanish coast were recently dated at more than 40,800 years old: a time before Neanderthals disappeared, raising the tantalizing possibility that they were indeed the artists. However, "it hasn't been demonstrated that Neanderthals produced any of that cave art," the Natural History Museum's Stringer said.

The simpler answer is that H. sapiens, who had also reached Europe by that time and are known to have produced later but similar art, were responsible.

Neanderthals, though, have proven advanced in other ways.

They used pigments and may have made jewelry; some made complex tools. "We know they buried their dead," Stringer said. In 2010, researchers from the Smithsonian Institution even found evidence that the Neanderthal diet included a diverse mixture of plants, and that they cooked some of the grains. (Related: "Neanderthals Ate Their Veggies, Tooth Study Shows.")

"Cooking something like oatmeal is not what we would have imagined," said John Hawks, paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With no pots, Neanderthals may have cooked inside leaves, Hawks suggested. "That starts to sound like cuisine."

"Neanderthals have gone from being different from us to being like us," Hawks noted. "They're looking like [Homo sapiens] hunter-gatherers look."

But while modern humans continued to develop cultural complexity and spread across the globe, the Neanderthals vanished. Why remains a mystery.

What if H. Sapiens did what was done when America was discovered 500 years ago?

In my country Argentina for example a blend of slavery, wars in the front lines, and interbreeding totally mixed the local population which is now predominantly white (my name Donald is a hint!), but with black and native components.

I do't thin that Neanderthals and Cromagnon were friendly when they encountered, it would be fascinating if they find evidence of half Neanderthal, half H. Sapiens remains and evidence of enslaved Neanderthal females in the fossils.

Sorry Tory StClr, you have been the victim of a brain washing, God did not create us we created him, you need to take hold and regain your ability to question what you are told by those around you before it is too late.

They died in the flood. Early humans (created by God) were much more intelligent than we think. They most likely used a higher percentage of their brain than we do...their memories were stronger, they were bigger and lived longer. Their knowledge increased to the point where they discovered how to mix genes. The Neanderthal, obviously a mix between a human and an ape was simply the Anti Antediluvian race biologically engineering them. The Neanderthal was simply a creation of man...a new species of man in which Go wiped out with the flood.

@Kasha Kata Australopithecus afarensis, the first upright ape, is a good place to start follow the genetic line up from there.

ps. homo sapiens sapiens are apes, just like Homo Habilis ( I tried to mention two other hominid species but National geographic apparently doesn't understand proper species names half the time and won't let me post something they think is incorrectly spelled i will leave some wiki links below to get you started so you know what to research. also there are humans born with tails is that good enough for you?

If Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens continually interbred throughout Eurasia, then it might have only been a matter of millenia before the entire population of cohabiting Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens (with their near identical DNA) was replaced by a new generation of 'hybrids' ie. the people of Asia, Europe, and the Americas. At the same time, the indigenous people from Papua New Guinea and Australia have Homo Sapien, Neanderthal, and Homo Denisova DNA. We think of ourselves rather vaguely as all being 'modern humans' but perhaps anthropologists in the future will look back on us and identify us with varying species and sub-species names to describe the hybridization of Neanderthal, Sapien and Denisova that exists within our genetic makeup.

And in furtherance, what about the tiny, 3'6" tall homo floresiensis? They were found in Indonesia, and they were dated back 700,000 years ago. Perhaps they evolved from a smaller primate than our Java ancestor? Homo sapiens are actually closer in DNA to chimpanzees than the great apes....why are we so certain, that our evolution resulted out of one single circumstance?

Well, yes okay, Rute, I'll provide you an answer, but you can decide how plausible it is. In Africa, a great ape species (ancestor of the Gorilla?) evolved into a human sister group. But there is another great ape species which we don't seem to be considering. What about the orangutan? The orangutan was (and still is) exclusively found in southeast Asia, the area where Neanderthals are considered to have first populated. I also think it's interesting that the ancients tell us humankind originally began out of Sumatra, where the orangutan's ancestor (Ponginae) existed. This would infer that two distinctive ape types evolved into humans, and not just one. I think Neanderthals, understood to have had fair hair and skin, strangely resemble the orangutan. I think this theory would support such great physical differences in human sister groups, and they exist to this day. I would hope, that if down the road this theory becomes seriously considered, that we deem both species of these great apes ''equal'. I hope we could educate modern humans, that even though we evolved from two different monkey species (lol), they were both of equal import.

So, there's a genetic similarity between Neanderthals and Europeans, Modern Africans do not have it... yet, it is believed that the 1st humans came out of Africa with the primordial genetic line traceable to the bowls of the continent and several descendants of Adam and Eve live to this day in a more so protected enviroment, hardly any mix ocurred whatsover... If there were a common ancestor between Neanderthals and Humans then there OUGHT to be Neanderthal genes in the African population?

Definitely there was some hanky panky goin' on... or someone is not telling the whole story since the explanation given here in this article makes no sense!!

I wish there had been more discussion regarding the specific traits that might be linked to Neanderthals. Could the development of certain behaviors (now considered neuroses) be linked to them and their environment? (I think this could be an exciting area of research.) Do those who have a larger than normal percentage of Neanderthal DNA tend to be stronger and stockier than average (I am and have over 3%). What about the picture? It implies that Neanderthals were redheads with blue eyes (like me). I think with a little makeup (I see she's wearing blush but it's not quite right for her) and hair products, Wilma could be quite pretty! She also needs to get that scowl off of her face. Of course, what the picture displays is a continued bias that implies modern humans are somehow more sophisticated. It's ridiculous, really and perpetuates this negative view of Neanderthals.

@Catherine Glidden We received some genes involving the immune system from Neanderthals, also genes having to do with hair. There are a lot of articles out there that discuss the genes we inherited. You should watch NOVA's Decoding Neanderthals, it's a great watch if you're interested in them.

Neanderthals were not human, were hominid-scavengers and had
more than twice bigger skulls than ours. Professor Chris Stringer and other
prominent anthropologists distorting human evolution, to support dubious “Out
of Africa” theory, of the emergence of Homo sapiens species about 200,000 years
ago in Africa. Prominent anthropologists create myths that the neanderthals
were intelligent humans who were able to fabricate composite tools, made and
wore clothing, were skilled hunters of large animals, and throwing spears with
stone tip glued (!) to the shaft. And playing flutes. They don’t say that
Neanderthals had more than twice bigger skulls than ours, but say, that they
were extremely similar to humans!

Well, Neanderthals were not human but wild animals, hominids
living exclusively at the level of instinct. Looked extremely different to
humans, had enormous elongated“monkey” mid-faces, heavy brow ridges, receding
foreheads. They didn’t hunt big game and were scavengers. Did’t fabricate
composite tools, did not know the clothes and walked naked. And never play
flutes.

Although Neanderthals looked extremely different to humans,
Professor Chris Stringer says untruth: "Neanderthals looked extremely
similar to humans but did not have chins. If you shaved and dressed a
Neanderthal and put them on the New York subway, no one would be able to tell
the difference between us and them”, said Prof Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural
History Museum in London.

@Jerzy Kijewski I am part Neanderthal, thanks much. In as much your comments being unfounded drivel, I find it rather repulsive that you automatically assume homo sapiens superiority. Your species isn't the pinnacle, it's a stepping stone. The next version of, 'us..' will be better suited for the world at that time. It's the natural order of things.

After a year-long camping experience in 2009, I suspected that my Neanderthal qualities came out, impervious to cold and wet weather on the Pacific Ocean, I became a leaner and fitter version. The greater the physical hardship, the leaner and meaner human comes to the fore to accept the prize; Survival of the fittest!

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